Speaker 1The Telegraph Ten years
Speaker 2and six months. Russell Brand is jailed for over a decade for rape and sexual assault. It's a huge victory for justice and for the heroic women who came forward to tell the truth about his abusive behaviour.
Speaker 3But questions remain unanswered. Why did the political left utilise his reputation to target the electorate despite his base of immorality? And why media institutions who employed him not only tolerated his behaviour but enabled and facilitated it by turning a blind eye?
Speaker 2He said, people don't mind if you behave in a very bad way so long as they're making money out of you. And there's an element with media of desperately chasing the current thing. And what matters is, does it get viewers? Does it get clicks? Does it generate cash? I don't know if that's a celebration of immorality so much, as it's just a thoroughly amoral approach towards culture. Just put on whatever it is people seem to want to see.
Speaker 1Every single thing about him is an act, isn't it? I have no idea who the real person is.
Speaker 3The BBC has a pattern of this. Yes. And the clarity of behaviour of Brand and Saville is deeply shocking that neither of them pretended that they were behaving well. Yes. And the bosses just turned and looked the other way.
Speaker 2Today we are reacting to the sentencing of Russell Brand who has been charged with one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. I'm joined by Jacob Rees-Mogg. Hello, Jacob. And we will be hearing from The Telegraph columnist Celia Walden who has met Russell Brand over the years. But first, let's look at the sentencing. In total, he was sentenced to ten years and six months. Yes. That's nine years for one charge of rape. Eighteen months total for three charges of sexual assault. These will run concurrently but consecutive to the sentence for rape. In his summation, Jacob, the judge described Russell Brand as, quote, a sexual predator who told a series of lies. Your casual, arrogant disregard of any woman's right to say no to you was obvious. One rape victim was, quote, a huge fan of yours, which you were happy to exploit. The whole episode reeks of casual disrespect, said the judge. And Brand's fame means you can act how you like when you like. As for Russell Brand's entourage, they indulged his dreadful behavior. Jacob, I think it's very important that we hear the voices of the women who brought these accusations and have finally seen justice. First impact statement by a woman who, who was sexually assaulted by Russell Brand in a Soho bar, says she didn't have any respect for her afterwards and felt like damaged goods. She said a leopard may change its spots, but at the end of the day, it's still a leopard and not a gazelle.
Speaker 3And she read that herself in court, which must take the most remarkable courage after all that she's been through.
Speaker 2Second impact statement from a lady who was sexually assaulted in Capital Radio's offices in 2005. She said, this has had a lasting impact on my life, even if I. I thought that I had successfully buried what happened. I recognize this now, but I tried for so long to be strong and carry on business as usual. She said that it affected her relationships with some of her male colleagues. A third statement from a woman who was ainly raped by Brand in his Hampstead townhouse in 2009 said, I struggled to eat and sleep. I found it difficult to cope with my emotions. The impact was so significant that I had to take time off from work. And for a period, I returned to live with my parents because I did not feel safe and felt uneasy. And I was unable to cope on my own. She added that one of the most distressing aspects following the incident was the fear that I might have contracted HIV. And finally, fourth impact statement from someone who was sexually assaulted in the studio in 2009 when she was working for Channel 4. She said, I was so worried about whether I would be supported and heard because I wasn't when I first spoke up initially after the assault first happened. I do not want others to be worried about speaking up because it's the right thing to do. I have a huge respect for every woman who took part and I think they are incredible. Interestingly, in her evidence during the trial, this woman said that she had reported her assault to the managers of Channel 4. And Jacob, that's one place to start. The sentence speaks for itself. Brand will finally get the justice that he deserves. But there have to be questions about the culture in which he was able to operate in a way that has been described as a predator in plain sight. How did he get away with this for so long?
Speaker 3And that's the point. It's in plain sight. He doesn't pretend that he is a moral person at all. He boasts of his immorality. He writes a book about it. He is proud of being a predator. And everyone thinks it's funny. And the bit that most mystifies me is that people didn't realise how awful an individual is. After the really nasty attack on Mr. Sachs, the man most famous for being Manuel in Fawlty Towers, which was a really cruel, unpleasant, vulgar thing to do. This is when he was doing a radio programme with Jonathan Ross.
Speaker 2And they ran Sachs up to claim that Russell Brand had had sex with Sachs' granddaughter
Speaker 3and asked him to kill himself. I mean, it's a really nasty story. It's a series of calls. And the BBC suspended Ross and I think fired Brand at that point. But nonetheless, the BBC thought this was funny and clever until it had a strong public backlash. And that's the very odd bit that everyone who has looked at Brand with any reasonable eye has seen that he is a deeply immoral person whose standards of behaviour are loathsome. And yet, employers were quite happy for him to get away with this and had no interest in supporting staff who were at risk from him. They didn't really mind the risk as long as they were getting the ratings. So you've got this lady from Channel 4, but you've got also the lady who was assaulted in Capital Radio's offices. And that shows, to my mind, a failure to run your office properly if somebody can be assaulted in your office. And not feel able to do anything about it.
Speaker 2Yeah, the BBC is accused of tolerating Russell Brand's behaviour with women. Not necessarily assault, but the way in which he pursued them.
Speaker 3But it's not just Russell Brand. No. Yes. Yes. And the bosses, just turned and looked the other way. And this is perversion in plain sight. Yes. And that seems to me to be deeply worrying.
Speaker 2Well, Russell Brand once said, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, people don't mind if you behave in a very bad way so long as they're making money out of you. Does it get clicks? Does it generate? I don't know if that's a celebration of immorality so much as it's a just thoroughly amoral approach towards culture.
Speaker 3It tells us that we've lost our way as a society, that we used to have some semblance of Christian values and there may have been a point at which people were hypocritical. No doubt, actually throughout history there have been people who've been hypocritical. But post the 1960s, being immoral has been seen to be a good thing. To be modern, to be progressive. And in fact, it isn't a good thing. It's a wicked thing. And it has terrible effects on people's lives. These impact statements are tremendously important because they tell us about four women who have been abused to a criminal standard. But Brad based it of thousands of women. Yes. All of whom will have some psychological scars from this. That the idea that, that there is consequence-free immorality is simply not true. Yes. That if people have relationships, there is a psychological consequence of that. And therefore, there is a moral responsibility for it.
Speaker 2But this is where modern society will push back against you and say that the bar is always consent. That it doesn't really matter what you do or how many people or in what way it's done. All that matters is so long as the individual consent to it that is the moral test for the modern world.
Speaker 3But consent always has to assume knowledge. And it has to assume perfect knowledge to have perfect consent. And there is not perfect knowledge, and there is the power imbalance that makes consent almost impossible. Yes. It seems to me that a superstar in his 30s cannot get consent from somebody age 20 in normal circumstances. It's not to say it's invariably impossible, Yes. but it's not to say it's invariably impossible, it is unlikely to be the case. a girl standing outside in the queue who gets picked out by the star is not really giving full rational consent. It is a power imbalance that is an abuse. But the fundamental morality of it is very important that one shouldn't shy away from the moral precepts that have guided society for thousands of years. They guided society for very good reason when they created a better society than the one we've now got that indulges this type of behavior and made it not only seem permissible, but actively good, actively admirable. And there are still people who admire
Speaker 2brand. I think some people think that Judeo-Christian teachings on sex have an unrealistically high standard of human behavior, do everything within marriage in short. But it's rooted in quite a pessimistic understanding of human behavior. And I think that's a very important point. It's a very important point. And I think that's a very human nature, which says some men, if given an opportunity, will do bad things to women. Therefore, we need to come up with social codes that protect women. That's right. The modern world, of course, sees that as patronizing and misogynistic. And it throws it back and says, no, what you're doing is telling women that they must avoid all men and this sort of thing. And they must be like nuns.
Speaker 3No, you're not saying that at all. You're saying that men should behave themselves. Yes, but we can't quite trust them to.
Speaker 2We can. I don't. I'm not saying all men are like this. I just mean, I think we.
Speaker 3We all need a moral code.
Speaker 2Before the 1960s, we erected these codes because we were trying to prevent things like Russell Brand from happening.
Speaker 3That's right. And that's not to say they never happened, that Don Giovanni explains in operatic form that it has happened in the past. But it was disapproved of. And what's interesting about Don Giovanni as an opera is that it shows the unhappiness that is created by immoral behavior. And post the 1960s, we've believed that immoral behavior makes people happy. And I just don't think that's true. I think Brand has made hundreds, if not thousands of women deeply, deeply unhappy. And a number of them we now know about has had a profound effect on their lives over 20 years because of his criminal behavior. So there is criminal behavior, and he will have a long time in prison to think about his criminal behavior. But the criminal behavior comes out of acceptance of immorality. And that is where society, the culture of society and the culture of the organizations he's been involved with, is fundamentally at fault.
Speaker 2Now, when Brand in the early 2010s was seeking a new degree of relevance, he recalibrated in order to embrace a form of morality, which is the political morality of the left. I'm very struck by images of Brand that have floated around during this trial. Even to this day, when the TV puts up a mugshot, it doesn't tend to show him as he is now, which is a man advancing in years with gray hair. It still puts up the old images of him that look like a strange cross between Jesus, Che Guevara, and David Koresh, right? It's still the handsome young revolutionary. And I guess when, because I didn't really watch telly in the 2000s, I didn't own one. He only really came into my orbit in the 2010s when he became political. And he was politics at the level of spirituality. You have to understand this. It might seem crazy to think about now, but he really was that much of a zeitgeist figure. This was a time in which the left had lost. David Cameron was in power. Austerity was happening. We were on the brink of Brexit. And the left was looking for a new kind of spiritualized socialism, something to give it a little bit of a boost.
Speaker 3But the left was behind the 1960s abandonment of morality. So it has to take the blame for the abandonment of morality. And the Me Too movement isn't actually advocating traditional sexual morality. It is doing something slightly different, actually something very different. It's trying to interpose the state in relationships rather than saying that there is a cultural morality. Right. Explain that for
Speaker 2people, the distinction between the two. Between a state endorsed sexual code and a religious cultural sexual code.
Speaker 3Well, a cultural code is something that people do and is built up from themselves and is imposed upon them by themselves. The left wing approach to the Me Too movement was that you should set up committees and make people have training so that they would behave well, rather than saying, actually the answer to this is people to follow the Ten Commandments and then it will solve the problem.
Speaker 2The right wing approach to the Me Too movement was that you should set up committees and make people have training so that they would behave well, rather than saying, actually the answer to this is people to follow the Ten Commandments and then it will solve the problem. I'm very suspicious of this whole phenomenon. At the time, Peter Hitchens was famously too. And of course, the first thing I did was Google Tim Stanley and Russell Brand to find out what I had written about him 10 years ago. And this was when he went on Question Time and debated Nigel Farage. And the point I made then was, why is he a media phenomenon? He knows nothing about politics. If you listen to him, the words sound very clever, but they're exactly what someone does when they don't understand the deeper wisdom. And it frustrated me and many people on the right at the time that he was being elevated into this guru-like status. And I think conservatives come out of this period quite well, because they make mistakes, no doubt about it, but they've got a very good nose, partly because they're snobs, for spotting intellectual dishonesty. And I think it was obvious in the 2010s that he was making it up as he went along.
Speaker 3Well, refused to pay his license fee after the disgraceful treatment of Mr. Sachs. And the BBC has never really properly apologized for that either. It was really nasty. It was very unpleasant. And I think that showed you something about Brand, that he is not a pleasant man for all his charismatic appeal. He was a media scene for 20 years and was a complete fraudster. He could have been Melmott out of Trollope's novel.
Speaker 2Former Labour MP.
Speaker 3Former Labour MP for Buckingham. There are these charlatans around, and they get lauded until they get exposed. The right is slightly more cynical about human nature as a general rule. And therefore, we tend to be less taken in by them.
Speaker 2They did fall for Jimmy Savile, Margaret. Margaret Thatcher fell for Jimmy
Speaker 3Savile, which is
Speaker 2sad. And the Catholic Church fell for Jimmy Savile as well. He got a very.
Speaker 3Jimmy Savile got a.
Speaker 2An absurd funeral. A funeral which is embarrassing to watch as a Roman Catholic. I mean, the priest actually says in his eulogy, I hope God will fix it for Jimmy to go to heaven. I mean, past the sick bucket. Yes. Even if he had been a good person, that's not the kind of thing a Catholic priest should be saying at a funeral.
Speaker 3Well, if we'd stuck to the old rite, we probably wouldn't have had that sort of thing going on in funerals anyway.
Speaker 2There should be no eulogies at funerals.
Speaker 3Indeed. Indeed, there's a few words on the gospel. But no, the rite doesn't always come to the correct answer with these people and sometimes gets taken in. It is just generally more cautious about human nature, recognizes the fallen nature of mankind.
Speaker 2But you take my point about the. I suppose not surprising, but blatant hypocrisy of the left in that period. You remember we were going to Tory conferences and being spat at because of austerity, right? It was seen very much as a. I don't remember being spat at. Oh, I was. It was a moral binary. And Brand was, as I say, the near saintly face of those who opposed austerity.
Speaker 3Was he? I just wonder whether that's being slightly overstated that, yes, he had the. with Miller Band and yes he had a certain following but i don't think he was that important in the grand scheme of things i don't think he
Speaker 2was important my my point is is that he was his image was used this is this is why i'm saying about why do we still paint him as shea guevara or jesus christ his image was used and embraced by a generation of left-wingers yes they
Speaker 3like they like that image they thought he was cool
Speaker 2yeah yeah by the time they were morally loading it over the right when the right was mostly just doing things in government that it had to do uh didn't necessarily want to do them though some people did um and all this time they were they were getting cozy with someone who we now know is grossly immoral and
Speaker 3wasn't denying it at the time no exactly obviously people didn't know he was a criminal at the time but he boasted of
Speaker 2his immorality yes yes then he goes away and comes back as a born-again christian baptized in the presence of bear grills who i will i will just read out a statement because i think it's a very good one uh by bear grills who says quote brand's faith seemed genuine to me at the time when i was a guest at his private baptism i have attended a few now even visiting in prisons with people who have committed terrible crimes it's part of our calling as men and women of faith to love and serve everyone it is the sick that need healing judgment is for the courts and god i wouldn't want to ever discourage someone's coming to faith i think that's actually a very good response because it would be tempting just to say look he points out that he's a man of faith and he's a man of faith and he's a man of faith and he's called the wall over my eyes but no when someone comes to you and says i want to be saved you have to take that at face value you and we have no right to judge whether he genuinely is a christian or not
Speaker 3yes i i've known bear for a long time uh and um he's certainly a very friendly acquaintance if not a friend and i think he has praised himself very well and wisely that of course forgiveness is a matter for for god understanding people's inner heart is a matter for god that um there's the first line about not liking to make windows into men's hearts is something one should always bear in mind on the other hand you can make rational judgments and you can look at brand and see that adopting apparently the clothing of christianity was very convenient to him in the circumstances that he was in not saying any more than that not saying that his conversion was fake but that it suited his purpose at the
Speaker 2time yes uh in the doc he had been noted to pray and to also pray his rosary again i'm not going to judge anyone for that i mean you can be guilty and in fact it could be a good thing it could be a sign of personal repentance i think what complicates brand is that the religion that he followed uh was very personalized and you can easily see how it would fit the worldview of someone who doesn't want to come completely to terms with what they did i'm
Speaker 3afraid at this point um i'm going to be slightly judgmental first of all the piers morgan interview where he couldn't quote a single line from the bible yes secondly the rosary is an extremely catholic prayer and it's just not clear
Speaker 2what his denomination is i can't he's not a catholic i can't figure it out
Speaker 3yeah his baptism wasn't a catholic
Speaker 2baptism no
Speaker 3it's not no i'm not sure that his baptism was a real i mean anyone can baptize as long as they do it with flowing water and say that they're baptized but i'm not sure that his baptism was a baptism and then farm and son the holy ghost the conditions are very slight yeah you don't even need to be a christian actually to carry out a baptism um but it has to be a a trinitarian baptism yeah and then it's accepted by all the churches but even so i'm not sure if those conditions were met and i wonder if he knows actually how to say the rosary what what what prayers is he is he saying or is it purely symbolic that his lack of knowledge when talking to piers morgan yes it's so startling that is is he saying the paternoster on the large beads and the ave maria on the small beads or is he just fingering them to show how religious
Speaker 2he is i watched the whole of his sunday service the one that he broadcast in the middle of the trial and i actually ended up watching it twice because i'm interested in theology and i found its modern take on christianity really interesting and instructive the fact that he did it in the middle of the trial was controversial enough he can't comment on a trial rightly so because we don't want to influence its outcome should someone in the dock be allowed to make something like that if i was the judge i might have told him to knock it on the head but if you listen to his whole approach towards christianity and again it's i don't want to be unfair to the man but given that he's just been found guilty in sentences hard not to see everything through the prism of someone who's trying to evade justice one narrative that's very strong with brand is the idea that everyone's guilty which we are we're all born in sin we're all born in sin we all do bad things but he keeps he keeps harking on this point we're all guilty we're all guilty you know we've all done it we've all done it his point being i infer that his guilt is one that all men share and the women who had sex with him share too in other words there's a kind of an equalizing quality to guilt that means that you shouldn't necessarily judge his more than other people's and nor should he perhaps take responsibility for it another thing i've noticed about brand's theology is it's very eastern he was once a buddhist and his take is almost taoist it's this idea that the universe is composed of energy and you move with the energy or you channel it and you direct it and he has spoken in the past about sex being an energy sex is something that the brand is just gonna happen because it's part of the universe and what he did when he was at his youngest and randiest was he was just a conduit for that sexual energy now again that helps to contextualize rape this sex is gonna happen right i'm just facilitating it but it was gonna happen and you and i were both guilty people we both want this sex so it's just gonna happen so it contextualizes that right it makes him a little bit less responsible for it um and in and in a strange way it somehow spiritually transforms what is something really gross and down and dirty into something which can be philosophized away in a very
Speaker 3clever manner except it doesn't because it isn't true yes and this is again it's a problem with people thinking they can invent their own religions that there is truth yeah and you and i believe that comes from teaching of holy mother and that tells you that yes we are sinners but as sinners we are responsible for our actions we can't blame them on energy or on god god doesn't make us commit evil acts we do it ourselves because we have free will and we have responsibility and liability for what we do and how they affect other people and most of sin is a question of the effect you have on other people not all of it but most of it and therefore leads you to a very different position from the one brand is adopting what he is philosophizing if you wish to give it that word which i think over aggrandizes it uh is self justification he is trying to say that he hasn't really done anything wrong because he's only done what anybody else is doing what
Speaker 2happens the way of the doubt it just happens
Speaker 3but that just isn't true because we have free will yes exactly and therefore we have responsibility and this is where you get into the question of repentance and again how do i know but there is a reduction in sentence for people who plead guilty at an early stage brand has got his sentence because he did not plead guilty at an early stage yes the failure to plead guilty at an early stage indicates that you are not repentant because you don't recognize that you did something wrong and that's really important this failure to understand that what he did was bad and the witness impact same as we talked about at the beginning show the terrible effect that had on innocent young lives which have had this weighing over them for 20 years and more
Speaker 2i don't want to give any impression that eastern religions do not have judeo-christian type understandings of sexual morality they do it's more that he has cherry picked different elements of spiritualities in a way that psychologically makes sense to him at one point in his sunday service he suggested that jesus was like wi-fi it's like tuning in and opening up but this there's
Speaker 3this is just awful awful nonsense it's dreadful psychobabble yeah and it's why religion needs the structures that are provided by the catholic church they need authority they need the ancient tradition that establishes them yes otherwise we can all pick and choose as we feel the mood takes us and then decide whatever we've done is fine because our philosophy has told us so this is just awful nonsense well
Speaker 2yeah well what i'm
Speaker 3doing in the name of tolerance yes except this bilge one's got to say that it is just rubbish
Speaker 2yes well i i agree but i've concluded having sat through so many hours of brandism that it's the theology of the addict of it's the theology of someone trying to make sense of being overwhelmed by a constant desire to do bad things trying to
Speaker 3make sense of it he's trying to keep his audience
Speaker 2or trying to justify it but that i think that's i really truly think that's what this is about But as regards to the audience, of course, The other interesting thing is, having flirted with the left, this won him a new audience on the right. Now, it's the outside right. It's the alternative right. It's people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, people who some people have suggested that he's innocent. But it's just intriguing, isn't it, that in the modern era, you can't be cancelled. In the old days, if you fell out with the BBC, Jimmy Savile excluded, if you fell out with the BBC and you got kicked off air, you were never heard of again. Now, what you can do through social media is you can build your own audience that can financially sustain you. And in that world, it's impossible to get cancelled. The commons can no longer exert a kind of moral discipline by saying to people, you've gone too far. We don't wish to hear from you.
Speaker 3But you can end up in prison.
Speaker 2Yes, you can't escape prison.
Speaker 3Yes. And his victims will be able to bring civil claims against him. And therefore, his earnings will. Will be spread rather more widely than he would have anticipated. Yes. So, be sure your sins will find you out, that he hasn't got away with this type of behavior. I'm in favor of not being able to cancel people because cancellation can be very unreasonable. It can cancel people who are saying perfectly sensible things. And the price of not cancelling is that people who are saying bad things are also not cancelled. But I think that's a price worth paying. Yes. But he has not got away with this. And justice has been done. And that's really important and should give us confidence in our society. Justice has been done in his lifetime. Fired, Savile, it all happened after they died. Good point. Yeah. Whereas with Brand and with. Who's the man who used to do cartoons? The Australian man. Rob Harris. That's right. And Gary Glitter. Yeah. Justice has been done in their lifetimes. Yes. And that, I think, is very important. And, you know. It comes back to the amazing job done by the brave journalists who reported on Brand.
Speaker 2To be clear, I am not pro-cancellation. I think at Stalinist, I'm just observing that it can be easily evaded nowadays. And my internet computer is full of people telling me they've been cancelled. But I can't seem to escape them. They never seem to shut up. I will make one grim prediction, which is Russell Brand will be back. He will find some way of monetizing this experience. And however long it takes, or if any of it even slips out of prison, I've no doubt we will hear from him. Because this is the kind of person who cannot exist unless it is in public. And I suspect being by himself is a very painful and difficult thing for him.
Speaker 3Well, though his crimes are of a lesser magnitude, Jeffrey Archer is the case in point, isn't he? Who went to prison for perjury, perverting the course of his life. Justice had a profound effect on some people's lives, very detrimentally by the lies that he told. And came back, bounced back, and was much lauded when he died.
Speaker 2He wrote a play about being on trial.
Speaker 3He made prison diaries. He made lots of money out of being a criminal, convicted criminal.
Speaker 2Are we looking here, if in a world which is uncomfortable with the concept of guilt, does it mean we also lose the self-regulation of shame?
Speaker 3Oh, that's a very good question. I wonder, I think some people are easily shamed and others aren't, and that has always been the case. And that shameless people are not new to this society. You and I would be deeply ashamed and would hide under a stone if we were accused of any of these sorts of things, let alone sent to prison for them. But that's probably why we don't get accused of them and sent to prison for them. Because the sense of shame helps us. It helps us, at least to some degree, to maintain such a moral code as we may have.
Speaker 2And you and I, I'm sure, will both know people who've done very bad things, who have found God and have turned their lives around.
Speaker 3Well, I'm a great admirer of Jonathan Aitken, who I think has done this in a really sincere and admirable way.
Speaker 2And what does Jonathan do today? He hasn't turned it into a TV show or an opera. He works as a prison chaplain, which is one of the hardest areas of Christianity. It's also a very serious question, a practice to work in. And if you, yeah, if you find God and turn your life around, that is best reflected in what you choose to do next. And some period of silence and working on behalf of other people, I think would be a very good way of demonstrating.
Speaker 3Well, Kumo is, of course, the great example of that. Yes. And I think that's unlikely for Brand, but not impossible. But he's got to come to terms with these very serious offenses. Which so far seems unlikely, that I'm afraid a performative rosary in the dark is not very convincing at this stage.
Speaker 2Let's now hear from Celia Walden, the Telegraph columnist who has written extensively about the charges against Russell Brand and who has met him face to face. Celia Walden, thank you very much for joining us. To begin by asking, how big a moment is this? Russell Brand, a man of his star power, his history, his charisma, being caught out as a predator and sent to jail?
Speaker 1Well, it's a huge moment. And as everybody knows, these sorts of cases very rarely end up even going to court. So the fact that he's being convicted is a big deal. And people are talking, you know, rightly or wrongly, sort of discussing it as a sort of follow-up to the #MeToo movement, that this is a seminal moment that will encourage other women to come forward. And that crucially doesn't mean that if you are a famous or powerful person, you are immune to the consequences.
Speaker 2You met him, you interviewed him back in 2012. Yes. What was he like in person? What was it like to meet the real Russell Brand, if such a thing existed?
Speaker 1Well, I should probably put it in context, because bear in mind, in 2010, we were sort of at the tail end of the sort of lads mag era. But he was still very much, I mean, you know, the kind of things that he would say in an interview would be unthinkable today. And yet at the time, when I was listening back to the transcript, sort of just baffling to think that anyone would talk to a journalist in that way. And as I say in the piece I've written, journalists contribute to that sort of, you know, there's a lot of banter going on. And I was asking questions that I wouldn't ask many other people and I probably wouldn't ask anyone today. But he was very happily responding to them all, talking about his sex addiction. About how predatory men are, about the aspects of women that he loved the most, about the sheer variety. And how, you know, the most delightful thing about women is that every one of them is different and there's something to love in each one. And it never, you know, the funny thing is that sort of thing just seemed, it was all so much a part of his brand that it wasn't as if it seemed peculiar to me.
Speaker 2And did that seem like an act or something genuine?
Speaker 1Well, I think every single thing about him is an act, isn't it? And, you know, the speech is ridiculous. The words were ridiculous that he uses. So you, as a journalist, you certainly had no idea who this person was. And I interviewed him twice and met him several times at social occasions because he was always out and about it, kind of. Magazine parties and, you know, the GQ Men of the Year Awards and all that, those kinds of things. So I sort of saw him, you know, in action in terms of socially. And there wasn't a single moment when his guard would drop and you would get a genuine impression of him as a human being.
Speaker 2And did you see, did you observe women being drawn to that or him being drawn to women?
Speaker 1Yeah, I think. I think a lot of women were, you know. I mean, even now, but amongst themselves, sort of, I'm hearing a lot of women saying, oh, you know, I did. I've got to admit, I did always find him very attractive and sort of charismatic. And, yeah, so he was certainly very popular with women. And none of his whole spiel about sleeping with more than 2,000 of them was off-putting. And, yeah, I think that was sort of what seemed to be off-putting at that time.
Speaker 2I guess it's Don Juan, isn't it? It's a sort of a notion of a mythical male ability and way with women. But always with the assumption that it's consensual every time, because it just sounds like such a mess that my instinct would be to stay away from it.
Speaker 1Well, well, I know you would think so. But as you say, he'd sort of perfected quite an old fashioned. swashbuckling kind of allure hadn't he I suppose and and I think a lot of people were taken in by the ridiculous way in which he speaks and thought that that was someone incredibly intelligent and philosophical and and when I met him the second time of course he'd been through this huge spiritual conversion which I also felt was was a complete sham where he was talking about having you know being born again and was a new man and and and he didn't touch anything sinful and and and was just very much in love with his wife and with his new baby which which is not at all hard to believe but but something about the sort of euphoria of it seemed to me to be just another another pose. Did you
Speaker 2also sense reading your very good column on it that with the conversion he was in love with his wife and with his new baby and he was in love with his wife and with his new baby he had mentally put all of that stuff in the past that he had created a sense of old and new Russell that was all-encompassing everything that did happen is part of his funny dark narrative of the past and of sin and everything new is the new him and you should accept the new him and let's not dwell too much on the old him.
Speaker 1Well I think that that it's certainly very convenient that isn't it and it's not the first time that we would see it you you see it quite often in the first time that we would see it you you see it quite often with with criminals or with where they they they go through a supposed sort of um conversion and they draw a very firm line between what they did before and what they what they are now um and and obviously that works out very well for you if you've done bad things um now I think at the time I just assumed that it was probably slightly cynical and more to do with the fact that that that the culture had moved on and it was no longer acceptable to go around talking about the the the the the the the the and so he had to find a new um you know he was a sort of chameleon like figure so he he knew that that he had to find a new shtick that would fit in with with the cut with sort of current um morals I just don't get
Speaker 3any of this really it seems to me he's always been utterly loathsome that he looks as if he hasn't washed in a month he could do with a jolly good haircut short back and sides and he was so open about his life that he was so open about his life that he was so open about his behavior like Jimmy Savile he went around telling people that he was pretty close to being a sex offender which he not we now know that he is and um Charles Moore wrote about this and the whole affair with Mr. Sachs and that once that happened everybody knew that he was just ghastly in every possible way and I I completely mystified that so many people have remained supportive of him for such a long time.
Speaker 1I mean I agree with you I I certainly didn't wasn't um uh sort of in awe of him or or drawn to him at all but but I I could I could see why his his sort of um what it was about his appeal that that that did work and I think it was just uh people a certain type of person would be taken in by him um and I also think as I as I wrote in my piece that I think it says that I I don't know what what criminal psychologists would say about this but there was that that idea that you can't actually be a pervert if all you ever talk about is is sleeping with lots of women that that that you know you must be that that it was sort of all above board and therefore not not not actually sinister um and um I I definitely at the time just thought he was one of those you great fun being famous and um and uh so I I didn't object to him talking about about how much he relished that because it felt it felt sort of just um the the way the way certain men did talk at that time. And yet
Speaker 2his later image was all about self-denial and religion. I mean Celia you write as an interviewer you write about famous people and the nature of celebrity and one interesting thing about Brand was his ability to sustain a career. Over 20 years. As you know with celebrity you culture is about good timing. People can become famous for five minutes usually and then whatever their shtick was it becomes old and you never see them again. But there were several different Brands weren't there? There was Brand as the young addict comedian, Brand as the movie star marrying Katy Perry, Brand as the left-wing agitator, and then finally Brand as the born-again Christian. Can you speak to that? Because that requires some cleverness some some cunning there to be able to spot what is coming and adjust your image so that you can remain relevant in each of those cultural cycles.
Speaker 1Yeah well I think that in you know in in a um a very straightforward way he deserved his fame because as you've just described he was able to keep um becoming the person that that people wanted at that particular time and it's actually very hard to do that most most celebrities or um artists find find that very hard to to do and they have one shtick that is perhaps more genuine than any of his were um and and they don't jump around but but I think it says a lot about um about how how mysterious he he still is the fact that he was able to slip on all those different masks um and um and unfortunately we uh the sort of sin-free um you know new man thing did go down really well I think people people thought oh isn't that great this this you know this this massive um uh sort of Lothario who's now settled down and and uh and he's seen the light and and people people really like that.
Speaker 3Do we assume he's a bit too clever really that he's just a moral vacuum who went along with vacuous society at various different times and in various different guises and that um prior to 2010 being laddish was sought to be the way to behave and now um being an anti-vaxxer and all that sort of nonsense has been popular and wearing God on your sleeve and it's it's just somebody who has a certain charisma plowing on through life and happening to be in the right place at the right time and in the
Speaker 1right place and I think that's a really important thing to think about. I never got I always thought that I never felt that he was clever um I think he just had looked up lots of words and and and thought you know and to certain people they were they were very impressive um um but uh um no I I don't think if you scratch beneath the surface um uh that I'm sure that wasn't the case and and in fact you you probably saw that clip of my husband's show where he had asked him to um where Brand had uh um uh had had started talking about the bible and my husband said which passages exactly were were the ones that were so formative and and crucial to you and uh and Brand was unable to cite a single single passage in the bible and so the whole thing sort of just falls apart.
Speaker 3And that's very important because the conversion and that great baptism ceremony in the Thames with poor old Bear Grylls is just performative it's very hard to believe that there's any reality in that he just rather liked pretending to be John the Baptist.
Speaker 1Yes yes but I think we're living at a time when when it when it's incredibly easy people don't tend to scratch beneath the surface you can get away with with just just saying this stuff and everyone believes you you know um um but with him and I think in in probably every area if you if you don't have that sort of push it wouldn't hold up.
Speaker 2Celia Walden, thank you very much. Thank you.
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